The Flow: Rivers, Water and Wildness

Description

On New Year's Day, 2012, Amy-Jane Beer and a group of her best friends set out to kayak a small river in the Howgill Fells. One of those friends, Kate, didn't come home leaving a devoted husband, a young daughter and a wide circle of friends bereft, bewildered and unmoored. Years later, missing the emotional connection to the natural world she always felt when she was close to rivers, Amy-Jane decides to reignite her love of rivers. She starts tentatively and close to home and then visits rivers further afield that she knows well - the Tees, the Wharfe, the Conwy, and the Lune - before she feels able to move onto rivers she doesn't know well, including the Tweed, the Parrett, the Otter and the Wye. In this beautifully written nature narrative, Amy-Jane details her visits - sometimes alone, sometimes with others - to rivers of different types and character, exploring them in different ways including on foot, swimming, paddling, canyoning, and by canoe or kayak. She explores river habitats and discovers species that live in or alongside rivers while she contemplates how our experiences of the natural world can help us deal with unexpected loss and cope with profound grief.

Dr Amy-Jane Beeris a biologist with a PhD from the University of London. She has worked for 20 years as a science and natural history writer and editor, and has written, ghost-written and co-authored more than 40 books on natural history. Amy-Jane is a Country Diarist and essayist for the Guardian, a columnist for British Wildlife, and a regular contributor to BBC Wildlife magazine. She contributed to Chris Packham's People's Manifesto for Wildlife as the Minister for Social Inclusion and Access to Nature and she campaigns widely for better gender and social representation in the wildlife sector and natural history media.

A true masterpiece; generous, elegant, acute, tender and furious. -- Charles Foster * Times Literary Supplement * The perfect commingling of deep research with sparkling observation and quiet eddies of feeling, helmed by a lifelong kayaker, biologist and all-round adventurous soul... small wonder The Flow is such a knockout. I loved it. * Melissa Harrison, author of All Among the Barley * A quietly courageous, open-hearted exploration of Britain's becks, bourns and streams. * Patrick Barkham, author of The Butterfly Isles * Lyrical, wholehearted and wise, The Flow is a hymn for the rivers of Britain. * Lee Schofield, author of Wild Fell * Honest, raw and moving, Amy's prose is as captivating as the rivers she describes. I thought I knew what rivers were, but this stunning book is a powerful reminder of their infinity, their mystery, and their bewildering complexity. * Sophie Pavelle, author of Forget Me Not * The Flow moves deftly between deeply touching personal experience and carefully-researched erudition. It is a book of wit, of wonder and of wisdom. * Nick Acheson, naturalist and conservationist * The Flow is an extraordinary book by an extraordinary author. * Chris Jones, conservationist and farmer * In a golden age for nature writing, this stunning book is one of the very best. -- Ben Hoare * BBC Countryfile * A gutsy biologist with webbed feet, Amy-Jane Beer plunges the reader into rivers the length and breadth of Britain. We emerge bathed in wonder and full of fresh understanding. * Derek Niemann, author of Birds in a Cage * Part memoir, part celebration of the many rivers and waters of Britain, The Flow is passionately alive - a work of tremendous range and scope by one of our finest writers about the living world. * Caspar Henderson, author of The Book of Barely Imagined Beings * The Flow is a tour de force: blending crystal-clear prose with mythic poetry and a cascade of lucid facts, washed down with uplifting insights into life, death and the water that sustains us. * Guy Shrubsole, author of Who Owns England? * Haunted by loss, The Flow is about the urgency of a life, land and love. * Nicola Chester, author of On Gallows Down * From the incredibly moving opening scene, to a delightful conclusion, Amy-Jane Beer takes us on a journey on, in and through the waterways of Britain, in sparkling prose. A worthy successor to Roger Deakin's Waterlog. * Stephen Moss, author of The Robin * The Flow is a wonderful book: as passionate as it is knowledgeable. From Yorkshire Derwent to Dart to Dee via the Zanskar, Amy-Jane Beer really does take us, in her phrase, 'as close as we might ever get to being a river'. * Mark Wormald, author of The Catch * With a poet's gift for description, Beer makes her global travels vivid [...] She's got an ability to make even a small moment resonate, such as her child's serendipitous discovery of a carnivorous sundew plant, with sharp prose and quick pacing. The result is an aquatic tour de force. * Publishers Weekly * Beer's book examines the reverential place rivers hold in our culture and the stories hidden in their depths. -- Joe Shute * The Sunday Telegraph * A sublime and companionable meditation on nature's processes. -- Charles Foster * Times Literary Supplement * I have read dozens of books about rivers and The Flow is one of the finest. -- David Profumo * Country Life * Necessary reading for us all. -- Julie Brominicks, landscape writer * BBC Countryfile * This erudite book is a joyous combination of science, nature, history, and mythology [...] a genuinely moving voyage of discovery of our ecological and personal place in the nature that surrounds us. * Yorkshire Life * The Flow is an epic memoir that inspires awe for rivers and reveals their dual nature as both boundaries and portals. -- Kristine Morris * Foreword Reviews * Beer's moving book is about water and landscapes as well as friendship, memory, loss and resilience. It is full of quiet wisdom and passion, and shows us what words can do when the personal and the ecological are blended organically. -- Elif Shafak * New Statesman * Water courses through biologist Amy-Jane Beer's deep-dive into the lyrical beauty of Britain's rivers. * Country & Town House * Simply beautiful. -- Stephen Moss The Flow is gutsy and profound from the off, with exquisite evocation of place, dives into deep time, moments of humour and surging anger at what we've done to our rivers. -- Ben Hoare * BBC Countryfile *